‘Transparent’ Proves Itself to Be TV’s Best Show About Difficult People

At one point in the penultimate episode of Transparent‘s second season, a character articulates to one of our Pfeffermans the idea that “your pain and your privilege are separate.” It’s a sentence that you might expect to find while bogged down in a debate about problematic culture and appropriation and a thousand other buzzwords — in fact, it does come in the middle of a conversation about safe spaces — but in the context of Transparent‘s assured second season, which arrives on Amazon Prime Video on Friday, it cuts to the core of what this family is going through. They’ve been through turmoil and pain; they have legitimate gripes with everything from mistakes their parents made to biology; oftentimes its their own choices that have aggrieved them. But creator/writer/director Jill Soloway and her team don’t ever let the Pfeffermans off the hook for how thorny, immature, selfish, and all-around difficult they can be to like.

The season premiere, which Amazon released early on November 30, set that difficult tone nice and early. Sarah’s (Amy Landecker) wedding put the spotlight on her for selfishness, but she doesn’t have to wait long for her siblings or parents to join her there. But while last year’s major conflict involved the kids coming to terms with the fact that their father was now their moppa, this season sees the Pfefferman siblings turning inward and coming to terms with their own lives. It makes them just as self-obsessed as before (if not moreso), but they’re a bit easier to take when they’re not being actively shitty to Maura, for example. (Raise your hand if you’ve still never forgiven them for bailing on Maura’s talent show last season.)

It’s funny, when talking about this show, I tend to have to check myself and remember what the show is groundbreaking for. Maura (Jeffrey Tambor) is a transgender lead character, and that is hugely important. And while that character remains foregrounded for the duration of the season, the experience of watching Transparent reminds you again and again that this is a family dramedy at heart. Its closest ancestors are shows like Six Feet Under, another show featuring difficult-to-like characters that was similarly focused on family.

The current television landscape is thick with difficult characters. The old requirements of likeability have long since loosened up, and shows from Game of Thrones and House of Cards to You’re the Worst and Veep marinate in the actively loathsome, to our great enjoyment. We’re living in a golden age of selfish bastards. Transparent‘s approach to its characters has always been to place their shortcomings right at the surface, then make the case for their humanity anyway. This only deepens in season two. After having run the gauntlet of coming out to her family in the first season, Maura begins to explore the greater queer community around her. The answers aren’t simple. Dating is a challenge. Questions about whether she wants to pursue surgical options to further her transition are even more so. She finds support with friends but pushback from characters like Cherry Jones’ radical queer feminist character, an academic who Maura, in her past as Mort, treated poorly when they were colleagues.

The past lies in wait for Josh (Jay Duplass) as well. He begins the season pre-betrothed to Raquel (Kathryn Hahn) and newly acquainted with Colton (Alex MacNicoll), the grown-up son he fathered with Rita, his babysitter/statutory rapist/symbol of his broken or at least bruised childhood. Maura and Shelly (Judith Light) don’t get to escape that particular chapter in Josh’s life unscathed either, and it’s no spoiler to say that at some point during the season, Josh starts to fuck it all up again.

There are all sorts of gender dynamics swirling around this season, and Soloway and company continue to shoulder the responsibility of a show that’s going to need to educate its audience to some degree. It’s to her credit, as well as the writers and cast, that this doesn’t feel like a list of talking points. Vocabulary lessons for words like “trans-amorous” come attached to scenes of Maura learning to bray “YAASSS QUEEN,” a moment that deserves to be enshrined forever in the hallows of TV comedy. Safe spaces, suicide risk, intolerance and conflicts within queer communities are all handled within stories that keep the characters upfront.

Ali (Gaby Hoffmann), as we’ve discussed before, is the worst, and this season she dabbles in everything from lesbianism and polyamory to academia and genealogy. It’s a credit to Hoffmann’s performance that Ali comes across as occasionally endearing as she does, even after all her bone-deep kneejerk selfishness. It’s through Ali that we get to the season’s most ambitious element, a series of recurring flashbacks to Weimar-era Berlin, where we meet Maura’s mother, Rose, as a teenager (played by Emily Robinson), and Rose’s sister Gittel (transgender actress Hari Nef). They’re guests at a salon run by a forward-thinking academic and doctor (Bradley Whitford) where gender fluidity and bohemianism are norms, and the world certainly appears to be spinning forward. Knowing history as we do, we understand this doesn’t come to a happy end. Soloway does a marvelous job weaving these scenes into the story of the Pfeffermans. Theirs is a history of pain, but also one of privilege. Rose escaped, after all. Maura eventually did too.